Breaking Bad 5.15 "Granite State" 9/22/13

Cafe Society
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I watched the restaurant scene from S2E6 (“Peekabo”) and the paraphrased conversation basically goes like this when it takes a turn into anger/rudeness:

Walt: You waving your checkbook around is not going to make me forget how you and Elliott, you and Elliott, cut me out.

Gretchen: That can’t be how you see it.

Walt: It was my hard work, my research, and you’ve made millions off of it.

…

Gretchen: You left me. You left me on Fourth of July weekend. When I went up to our room you were packing and wouldn’t say a word…were barely talking.

Walt: That’s your excuse, to make your empire off of my hard work?

Gretchen: How can you say that, you abandoned us. Abandoned me, Elliott.

Walt: Rich girl, just adding to your millions.

Gretchen: I don’t even know what to say to you. I don’t even know where to begin. I feel so sorry for you Walt.

Walt: Fuck you.

==========

The “our room” bit to me makes it clear Gretchen and Walt were still an item as of a Fourth of July weekend at her parent’s house. Something happens and Walt packs angrily and leaves and that by and large ends his relationship with Gretchen, Elliott, and Grey Matter. We’ll probably never know, nor do we really need to know, what happened there. We can assume Walt was probably slighted in some way, and the insane pride and ego that we know exists exploded out of him. For most of his life he kept that part of himself under wraps, especially during his 16-17 years of “normal” married life with Skyler. But it was always there, and it caused him problems long ago. It’s also probably why he later went from doing lab work as a real chemist to being a high school chemistry teacher.

It’s obviously what lead to him making meth (his pride prevented him from taking a handout from Gretchen and Elliott) and what lead him to continue making it even when there were multiple times he could have just simply quit throughout this and his family would have been safe. He even could have quit prior to Skyler finding out about the meth and probably still would have had the ability to leave them a fortune.

Hell, he was free and clear until he told Hank that the notebook was the work of someone copying a mentor or whatever. Hank is smart, but he was very, very content with Gale as Heisenberg. He was done, finished, with that until Walt opened his mouth.

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Gilligan also said the last episode was titled ‘Felina’, which he said meant final.

Of course, Felina is also the name of the barmaid in Marty Robbins’ song ‘El Paso’, where a man had to leave town because he shot someone. The singer was ultimately drawn back to see Felina and it cost him his life.

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If that were the case, I don’t think Gretchen would have asked him why he left.

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Yeah, but at the same time I’ve actually fired a machine gun. It’s not something you’re going to get proficient at by reading a manual or even a few minutes of playing around.

Breaking Bad isn’t hyperrealistic like The Wire, it’s more cinematic like The Sopranos (which is fine, I prefer the Sopranos to the Wire), but it’s still within the realm of those two extremely good crime dramas to the point that I don’t think we’ll see something insanely beyond the realm of believability. It isn’t like the Wire, where a warehouse filled with drug dealers and guns, grenades etc simply surrenders when the police show up unexpectedly (which is what most likely would happen in real life, career criminals like the Barksdales know you can never win in a prolonged shootout with police–those weapons were intended for the Stansfield crew and not the police.) But it also isn’t Commando, this show has been akin to the Sopranos in that it does have “movie” like moments that wouldn’t happen in real life but it tries to maintain some realism and seriousness. For Walt to suddenly become a badass who can lay waste to an entire gang with a machine gun would be very hard for me to accept.

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Not to mention, an M60 eats ammo like crazy, unless I am remembering incorrectly Walt seemed to have bought a few belts of ammunition with his purchase, I don’t even think I saw an ammo box with it. That means he’s got maybe 300-400 rounds (you can find belts in all kinds of sizes but 100 is what you’d expect from military sourcing, 200 isn’t uncommon and then larger specially put together belts can be found but after a certain number of rounds the weight of the belt can cause problems–in sustained fire you’re supposed to change barrels every 100 rounds or every belt, this is a rate of fire where you’d use about a belt a minute which is not the maximum rate of fire where you could use up to 500+ rounds a minute but would also have an extremely hot barrel.)

All that is to say, he didn’t seem like he bought enough ammunition to get much practice in, so it’s unlikely even with extensive watching of YouTube videos and reading the owner’s manual he’ll even have the equipment necessary to get the practice in he’d need to become very proficient at all with the M60. He has enough ammo to kill Jack’s crew several times over if he were a trained infantrymen trained to carry the M60, but Walt isn’t that. Depending on how much you fuck it up he could end up basically being unable to even fire the weapon after the first belt was used up.

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Oh I agree- I don’t think Walt is going to take out the Neo-Nazis with the M60. Like I said, I think Jesse is going to take them out (but I don’t know how).

There were three ammo cans in the trunk of the Caddy. Again, I think it will be very interesting to see what Walt has in mind.

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It’s pretty clear to me that Gretchen got together with Schwartz well after Walt dumped her. She had no idea there was a problem. It is hinted that Gretchen’s brothers did something that pissed Walt off, likely it’s something that he saw as belittling.

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Also, M60 or not, Walt is just one guy. There’s a entire gang of Nazis who will be shooting back. It doesn’t exactly sound like an ideal tactical situation.

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Yes, but we’ve seen from the To’hajiilee encounter that Nazis can’t aim worth a shit. :wink:

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Oh and Declan and his organization as well are now gone.

From the law enforcement POV winning the drug war is not a realistic goal but winning enough battles to make a dent is. Boy, what price would the powers that be have paid to have gone from industrial level meth production and distribution at an international level down to scattered local high school drop outs smurfing and buying a few boxes of matchbooks at a time?

I just note the unobvious - it does not make him any less despicable.

I hope Jesse will somehow lay waste to all of Uncle Jack’s gang, especially Todd. But then I hoped to see an epilogue with him and Andrea somewhere in the future. I hoped to see him use what is actually a fair amount of smarts (if not science bitch) to make his escape and then at least die a somewhat noble death - I am not too hopeful about my hopes.

Walt knows Uncle Jack never killed Jesse, he knows Todd could not pull off the blue stuff. He knows he cannot leave money as a legacy. He has no empire. His son just wants him to die. His wife no longer uses his name. He wants to leave as a legend and he wants revenge.

I have no idea how he plans to achieve those goals and I hope he gets his revenge on Uncle Jack and Todd (but not Jesse) … but dang I want to see him end up not as a legend but a pitiful lump who dies with his family (Jesse as fictive kin included) literally turning their backs on him and just letting him die.

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So I guess this episode really established Todd as the Big Bad for the showdown? It’s funny, last episode we were still talking about uncle Jack as the main antagonist, and complaining about how unsatisfying that was, with Todd still very much second or third banana in the Nazi crew. But he has really stepped up as chief psycho now, and he’s a whole lot more interesting than his uncle.

Although this episode felt like a lull after Ozymandias, Todd, at least, managed to get in a surprising amount of development and plot significance.

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Walt wants the truth to be told. He wants Flynn to know that he didn’t kill Hank. He wants the world to know that his ideas are what made Grey Matter a huge success (the Schwartz’s know this but they are doing damage control). His final motivation is for everyone to know the truth.

He’ll use the gun to get the truth out and then he’ll heat the ricin. Then there will be some final irony that none of us can possibly imagine.

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Maybe he’ll stage a Last Stand with the M60 in a public place, firing some rounds with no intention of hitting anyone. When the media shows up he tells his side of the story and swallows the ricin.

Elliott and Gretchen adopt Jesse?*

*Can you adopt an adult?

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Not to pick on anyone in particular, but about that company…

It’s Gray Matter. With an “A”.

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Its only 6 nazis as far as I can tell. If you are in a good defensive position and all 6 are only armed with handguns then you can probably mow them all down.

I’m guessing Walt tries to redeem himself somehow. He kills the 6 nazis, frees Jesse, poisons Lydia and dies somehow (either in prison or in a gun battle).

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Of course he left. He left because of her feelings for Elliot. Once she chose Elliot over him, Walt felt like he had to leave.

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He left because he felt snubbed and belittled by Gretchen’s family. She hooked up with Elliot later.

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I don’t know about that. I imagine a number of scenarios. Maybe it was the way she was looking at Elliot. Maybe it was how she touched his sleeve. Maybe it was a phone call, or a photo, or a little lie. Maybe it was something she said, that gave it away. Or maybe he knew for a fact there was something between the two of them. It would be perfectly like Walt to leave, without saying what he knew, or to admit what he knew, even twenty or thirty years later. But when Walt says, “something happened… I’m not going to go into detail…for personal reasons,” what else could it be?

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I really hope that doesn’t turn out to be true. What I want to see: Walt goes for the Nazi’s to get his money back. In the chaos Jesse kills Todd at a crucial moment. Walt takes out the other Nazis. Jesse then kills Walt, turns himself in and claims self defense.

The final confrontation needs to be Walt vs Jesse.

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While it seems to me to be fairly clear that there was some ego bruising that went on and that he reacted very badly to, probably related to money and class, causing him to huff off (him?!?) and make a bad ego-driven decision to leave the venture, for the story line it does not matter. Could have been he at least believed they had a thing behind his back (even if they didn’t). Point is that he blames that loss of what he believes was by rights his on others … resentment that he has carried the rest of his life and that finally motivated him to prove himself (stupidly) in some other way once he knew he was dying. And again, as he was ready to give himself up that was the ego kick in the pants he needed. He was nothing other than helping create the name … nothing.

The nature of the “offense” does not matter. Just that his ego drove his departure and that he has lived with that mistake (blamed on others) repressed all his life until his diagnosis. He begins the show having felt the bullied finally standing up for and proving himself at least to himself. But the reaction catalyzed by his diagnosis proceeds …